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A Different Education Math

Minnesota spend about $8500 per student each year. It fails somewhere in the middle among the states. So for a class of 30, you have a pool of $255,000 to work with. What could you do with that kind of money?

Well first thing you’ll need is a classroom for 200 days. I’ve booked a lot of meeting rooms and you can get a nice space in a nice hotel for about $250 a day. That’s $50,000. But that includes all the clean up and AV. Average teacher salary is $50,000. So let’s take two of those. We’ve spent $150,000 so far. What to do with the rest?

I know, let’s get them a health club membership. Let’s do $40 per month per student for 9 months. That’s about $10,000.

While you wouldn’t get everyone a new laptop every year, you can get a nice one with software for about $500 each. I got one just like that on my desk. That’s $15,000. Some hotels let you use their internet for free.

So know we only have $125,000 left. We can buy a lot of educational stuff like books for $2000 a student. Now we only have $65,000 left.

I know, let’s get two teacher’s aids at $30,000 each. Now we’re left with only $5,000 for other stuff.

So we have a nice airy classroom that’s always clean. We have two teachers and two teacher aids. Every kid can go to the health club every day. Everyone has a laptop and new books. Must be funny math. I wonder what we could do with the $14,000 per student Washington D.C. spends.

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6 Responses

Very cool idea. I’m sure there is some percent of overhead to cover admin, etc. And there are other extracurriculars and field trips, etc. But it still seems quite within range. A bigger issue is that we actually need a curriculum that is empirically validated (only about 2% of text books are actually validated as producing learning with students) and teachers who can actually produce reliable, measured learning. It’s expensive, apparently, to FIND these things and make one’s way through the flavor-of-the-year maze laid down by textbook publishers and education professors/”experts.” Seems like we should be able to AFFORD it all. I’m just not sure that there are standards or a system that can guarantee learning (unlike, for example, the Morningside Academy in Seattle, which has guaranteed 2 years of student progress per year in school or your money back.)

Okay, we will just assume it’s a different school system that does $10,000 a student. I was just adding things up on the fly. If it costs us $80,000 for a $50,000 teacher that might also be part of the problem. The point is if you cut out all the mandates, adminstration and wasted money, you can do a lot of stuff. When you get bound by state required curriculums you actually teach less for more.

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